Oz is now available in Oz! As March on Oz™ continues its world tour, it will shortly (within hours) be available for purchase by players in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Singapore through Apple’s App Store. We hope players in those countries will now join the march and, in the words of one player-reviewer, agree that “It’s very hard not to love this game as it has everything I or anyone gaming in the mobile world has been looking for..”

What a year+ it has been for our studio. When we first started work on March on Oz™ a year ago, we were a collection of individuals, most of who had never worked together before. Additionally, many of those folks had no experience making games professionally. Now we are a team and one that can proudly point at MoO and say “I worked on that!” MoO is not an earth shattering, OMG revolutionary, “One game to rule them all” game but what it is a fun, gorgeous, lovingly crafted and humorous iPad game that will continue to evolve over time. As of late yesterday night, gamers from across North America, the EU, and many other fine places that I still have not had a chance to visit, could buy the game from Apple’s App Store.

Launching a game, whether MoO or even an MMO, is only the beginning of the process. Over the next few months, MoO will see more units, more mini-games, and most importantly more difficulty levels. These new units and settings move the gameplay more toward the “action-reaction” kind of games and less like the “build it and watch the fun/frolic” kind of game. Moreover, once you have seen “Ski-jumper N.O.M.E.” in action, you will smile, a lot. That’s one of our goals with MoO, to create a game that can be played by casual players as well as gamers who want a lot more A/R in their games, especially for our PC version (coming down the road a bit, we hope, on Steam!). In the meantime, if you have an iPad2 or newer version, please check out our game and if you enjoyed the game, please do not hesitate to review/rank us on the App Store!

My thanks to everyone at City State Entertainment and especially to my co-founder Andrew Meggs, for bringing MoO to life. It has been a great journey so far and I know it is going to get even better.

As CSE’s time in crunch winds down and we bid a fond farewell to long days and occasional Saturdays, take-out/delivery food and lots and lots of items in Mantis, this week is ending on some very positive notes. Last week were able to begin talking about Formation Crafting™ (albeit in its most basic form) and at the end of this week, our punch lists are looking rather small and puny. As development winded down we had a couple of rather common issues come up, the ever-popular slow memory leak and overall performance degradation. On Thursday, just as we thought we had looked down every back alleyway in the code, the team crited their perception roll and found a hidden passage that got us over those humps (and did so in style). While MoO on the PC runs at a fabulous frame-rate, the iPad versions have been steadily losing FPS as we’ve added more features, textures, effects, etc. to the game. With all the changes we made over the last few weeks our frame-rate is getting back to where it needs to be on the iPad. The team has also been working diligently to decrease the overall memory footprint of the game as well as the download size and we’ve made a ton of headway (we’ve cut the downloaded size by more than 1/3). Additionally, based on the end of the week testing by the team, we’ve squashed the one stability issue that was still bugging (sorry) us and now instead of being able to play through 95%-99% of the game (at one seating) without crashing, you can now play 100% without a hiccup. So, it was a very good week and if all continues to go well over this weekend and early next week we will be submitting MoO to the App Store by week’s end.

As always, I am thrilled to be working with a small, independent team of very dedicated and hard-working guys and gals, many of whom had never worked in the games industry before. Even during crunch, everybody has stepped up and done what was asked of them, time and time again. No politics, no prima-donnas but just a bunch of people making a game of which they are very proud. And as proud of the game I am myself, I feel an even greater sense of pride in the team that we have built here and the effort that they have made on MoO.

Over the years,decades,eons (it feels that way sometimes) that I’ve been making games, I’ve always tried to come up with interesting bits that are unique to every game that I or my studio, have created. Usually these elements are evolutionary changes, sometimes, albeit more rarely, they are revolutionary (I hate the overuse of that word by so many people so I rarely use it myself). I’ve been fortunate over that time to have been able to both incorporate a lot of my ideas and those of my co-workers into games such as Dragon’s Gate, Aliens Online, DAoC and WAR. Once again, I believe our studio has come up with a feature that is both figuratively and literally a game changer. We call it Formation Crafting™ and its use in March On Oz™ is, in our opinion, quite a nifty feature to add to not only this type of game but other games we hope to create as well. And for me, one of the best parts is that someone other than me birthed the idea (in this case it was Scott, one of our artists) and that makes me smile. It is confirmation of one of the values that is core to this studio that, great game design ideas can and should come from any member of the team, whether it is a programmer, artist, human resources, PR, finance and yes, even a old warhorse of a game designer on occasion. Formation Crafting in MoO is just the first step, we have lots of ideas on how to take it to the next level and we look forward to bringing those to life as well a little further down the road.

For today’s fun, here’s a look at two very different levels from our soon to be released game, March On Oz™ . The first level is one in which the player cannot use any projectile weapons and must find a way to stop the incoming Bomber Nomes by causing them to blow each other up. The second level shows both some of our ground effects (in this case snow and ice) and a rather unique Nome, Gordie How? who is always looking to put the biscuit in the basket! So, when RuggeDoh was looking for someone with a wicked slapper to play some shinny, GH was his #1 pick.

So, avoid a five minute major and a trip to the sin bin by clicking here.